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In May of 2021 members of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in Canada arrived on the grounds of the old Kamloops Residential School with ground penetrating radar. Soon, as expected, they made a grisly discovery: the bodies of over 200 children as young as 3 years old buried in unmarked graves. In June, people of the Cowessess First Nation discovered 751 children’s bodies at the site of the Marieval Indian Residential School and in July, the Penelakut Tribe found another 160 at a school in British Columbia. If you’re keeping count, that’s over 1,000 dead indigenous children buried in unmarked graves across Canada. This news shocked the nation, the world, and led to investigations of old Native American Residential Schools in the US. After all, we had started all of this. Our schools were the prototypes, the models for those in Canada. And once we finally cared to dig, only a few years ago, the horrifying truth began to pour out, a truth that indigenous people have always known. That, starting in the 1800s, the US government forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools hundreds of miles away where they ruthlessly tried to destroy all traces of their culture, to assimilate them into white society. Schools where children were beaten for speaking their native language, where their hair was cut off, their names were changed. Schools where they often faced hard labor, starvation, physical and sexual abuse, and even death. The US government did this, and then it conveniently forgot about it until very recently, like a couple weeks ago recent. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This is a topic that’s been on my list for a long time and I’ve even had a few listeners reach out to me to suggest it. I’m not sure why I didn’t cover this one earlier but I’m glad I didn’t because there has been some very recent activity on this one that, if I had done it earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to include. So, right on schedule once again. But before we get into this doozy of an episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that tomorrow is Veterans Day in the US. This is a holiday that honors former members of the US military for their service to the country, an incredibly worthy day. Because so often veterans do not get the recognition they deserve, especially veterans that served in wars that weren’t well supported by the people. I think everyone pretty much agrees that World War II veterans are super heroes but, sadly, the same cannot always be said for veterans of, for example, the Vietnam War. Many who served returned home despised by some Americans who vilified them for serving in Vietnam, going as far as to call them “baby killers.” Many suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, depression with little aid from the country that sent them to war to begin with. And many of these veterans are still alive. So, I hope that if you know a veteran, any veteran, you’ll reach out to them tomorrow with a heartfelt thank you. I did not manage a full episode in honor of Veterans Day this year but I did pull off a mini fix that you’ll find over on the patreon (that’s patreon.com/historyfixpodcast but it’s also linked in the description). Super crazy veteran story for you. Here’s a sneak peak:

When you think of a war hero, you probably picture a muscular, rugged, ripped uniform soldier with a chiseled jaw, carrying his injured comrade over his shoulder while he dodges bullets and ducks behind obstacles. He’s a regular GI Joe. He saves lives, he survives, and he returns home, decorated with medals to the cheers and applause of his fellow countrymen. That’s a stereotypical war hero. Douglas Hegdahl was a war hero but he certainly wasn’t the stereotypical type. He wasn’t at all what you pictured. Trade out the muscular hunk in camo for a skinny cross eyed boy sweeping sidewalks. That’s Douglas. But don’t let his appearance fool you. Because beneath the exterior that earned him the nickname “the incredibly stupid one,” Douglas was not stupid at all. His name is not well known. He received few medals. Yet, something tells me that his story is going to blow your mind. Let’s fix that.

You can listen to the first 5 minutes for free over on Patreon, subscribe for just $5 a month, or purchase just that mini fix for $3 if you’re an anti-subscription type. It costs a tiny bit more if you’re using an iphone though, take that up with Apple, that’s on them. But you can bypass that by using your computer I’m pretty sure. Okay last order of business, I promise, T-shirts are still for sale but just for 2 more weeks and I don’t know when I will do this again so if you want a History Fix t-shirt this is your chance. The link is in the bio for that as well. Okay back to the show.

After the bombshell discoveries across Canada of over 1,000 dead children at Native American residential schools, the US was finally forced to act. Canada wasn’t alone in this. The United States had set up residential boarding schools as well with the goal of forcing indigenous children to assimilate into white society, hundreds of schools, we didn’t even know how many. And we had no idea how many bodies we’d find buried in their school yards either. The same year as these discoveries in Canada, 2021, Deb Haaland was sworn in as US Secretary of the Interior, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, and her mission became clear from the start. In June of that year she announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to quote “recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past,” end quote. And with that, the US government started looking into these schools which operated from 1819 until around 1970 for the first time ever. And their findings are predictably shocking, officially recognizing what indigenous people have known all along. In response to the bodies found in Canada, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Roseanne Archibald said quote “For many Canadians and for people around the world, these recent recoveries of our children — buried nameless, unmarked, lost and without ceremony are shocking, and unbelievable. Not for us. We’ve always known,” end quote. And the same can be said in the US. So what did they find here?

Information compiled by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition suggests that at least 523 boarding schools for indigenous children operated in the US and that the vast majority, at least 408 of them, received federal funding. The others were run by religious groups, mostly Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian Churches. When they brought in their own ground penetrating radar, they found hundreds of children's bodies buried across these various school sites but estimate that there are likely thousands if not tens of thousands of unmarked graves across the country. They spoke with survivors of these schools. They listened to their tales of horror, the trauma they had endured. And they made all of this information available, confirming what most had only suspected for centuries.

Where did the funds come from for these schools? You may ask. This seems like a massive undertaking. Well it certainly wasn’t going to come from funds set aside to educate white children. No. Funding for these indigenous schools came from land the US government stole from Native Americans and then sold. It also came from trust accounts that had been set aside for the benefit of tribal nations as part of treaties in which they ceded land to the US. Like, you give us this land, we’ll set aside this money, federal funding, to help support you on the reservation. And then they used it to set up these schools. A New York Times article that I referenced for this episode says quote “In other words, the United States government effectively made Indigenous peoples use their own funds to pay for boarding schools that severed their children’s ties to their families and cultures,” end quote.

So let’s look at how this was done exactly. It really started in March of 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act Fund. According to Hope MacDonald LoneTree writing for the Administration for Children and Families, this act had good intentions. The purpose of the act, on paper was to provide quote “against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes,” end quote. To preserve them, to help them. But unfortunately, through the lens of 1819, the only way to help them was to force them to assimilate into white American society and that meant stamping out all traces of their own culture, language, religion, all of it. LoneTree says that the act quote “resulted in the establishment of residential Indian boarding schools across the United States that brought mental and emotional suffering, physical illness, immediate decline of indigenous culture and languages, crimes against young children, and early death to many Native American children due to abuse. A little more than two hundred years later we now recognize that the enactment of this legislation in 1819 led to the rules, policies, and practices that systematically exposed Native American children and students to myriad adverse childhood experiences that have continued to affect generation after generation,” end quote.

The residential school that really created the mold for all the residential schools, including those in Canada, was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School built on former army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This school was founded by Richard Henry Pratt who was a military officer. Yeah he wasn’t like a teacher or anything that had anything to do with children he was a military officer who had fought in the Red River War. This was a military campaign in the 1870s that sought to forcibly remove the Comanche, Kiowa and other indigenous groups from the southern plains region which includes Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. So Pratt had fought to take Native American lands before dedicating himself to eradicating all traces of their way of life in their children. Ben Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe attended the Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He was the fourth generation in his family to attend one of these residential schools. Actually, his great-grandmother, Lizzie Glode, had attended the Carlisle School. She was one of the first groups of students sent to that school when it opened in 1879. Sherman says in that New York Times article quote “The government was not done with war, so the next phase involved war against the children. Don’t try to tell me this wasn’t genocide,” end quote.

So, like I said, the Carlisle school was the model for pretty much all of the future residential schools that sprang up around the country. The New York Times reports quote “[Pratt] was blunt about his mission, as in his infamous proclamation: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Mr. Pratt dreamed of abolishing the reservations and scattering the entire population of Native children across the country, with some 70,000 white families each taking in one Native American child. He came up short in this effort, but he did succeed in creating a model that placed schools in white communities, often far from the reservations where Native children were born,” end quote.

In order to actually get these children to the schools, Congress passed laws that basically forced parents to send them by taking advantage of the control the government had over indigenous groups. The treaties that took Native American lands and forced them onto reservations also guaranteed them food rations, government supplied food rations. Like, “oh we’re taking all your hunting grounds and farm land but here’s some powdered milk and a can of beans on us.” More or less. And so to get them to relinquish their children, Interior Department officials were authorized to withhold these food rations from any families who resisted. Hunger Games much? Sometimes, parents willinging let their children go, hoping that the schools would offer better opportunities or better conditions than the reservations, this was especially true during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for the most part, they were coerced into relinquishing their children with the threat of starvation. And they weren’t just like sending them to school, see you next summer. No. They had to sign over custody of their children. If coercion didn’t work, they were arrested. In 1894, 19 Hopi men were arrested in Arizona when they refused to relinquish their children. They were imprisoned at Alcatraz for almost a year and their children were hauled off just the same.

And all of this was happening at a time when the US was actively trying to take land from Native Americans. Historian Dr. Brenda Child says in an article for Time Magazine quote “We always have to remember that the goal of the schools was assimilation, but it was also about Native people. To me, the great genocide of the boarding school era is the land loss and dispossession that accompanies the boarding school policy. People at the time thought Native people could just abandon their homes and reservations and tribal ways and wouldn’t need a homeland anymore” end quote. Dr. Child reports quote “Indian people lost 90 million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States,” end quote.

When they arrived, at the Carlisle school at least, they were photographed in their native clothing and then began a transformation. Their hair was cut short which, according to the New York Times was a quote “particularly cruel and traumatic step for those coming from cultures like the Lakota, where the severing of long hair could be associated with mourning the dead,” end quote. They were given non native clothing to wear. For boys that was basically a military uniform. For girls, picture a Victorian style high necked dress. And their names were changed. Former Carlisle student Luther Standing Bear recalled being asked to point to a name in a list of names written on a blackboard. He wrote in his 1928 book “My People the Sioux,” quote “When my turn came, I took a pointer and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy. Soon we all had the names of white men sewed on our backs,” end quote. The New York Times reports quote “Just as Carlisle had a renaming policy, other schools took note, often assigning names that could be humiliating, such as Mary Swollen Face or Roy Bad Teeth. In other cases, children were randomly bestowed common American surnames like Smith, Brown or Clark, or given the names of presidents, vice presidents or other prominent figures,” end quote.

After completely altering their identity by cutting their hair, forcing them into new clothing, and even renaming them, another photograph would be taken. The before and after shots would be released side by side as evidence of the school’s mission. Because Pratt was a military guy who knew nothing about children, his Carlisle school was set up a lot like the military. They were drilled like soldiers and he used a court martial format where older children sat as judges over younger children. And because the Carlisle school was pushing out all this propaganda, these photographs of these amazing transformations, other schools just like this started popping up all over the country, following Pratt’s example. Their mission was clear. At the opening of the Phoenix Indian school 1891, commissioner of Indian affairs, Thomas J. Morgan said in his speech quote “It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” end quote. Cheaper. That was his selling point. Cheaper because of course the bare minimum was spent on these children. A newspaper article that same year, 1891 published a communication log between the superintendent of Grand Junction Indian School in Colorado and the secretary of the Interior that reads quote “Indian boy here with six toes; can’t possibly wear government shoe. What shall I do?” And while any sane person would respond, you know, we’ll get some specially made shoes for him, or even let him go barefoot, that’s not the response that’s given. Instead it reads quote “Off with his toe!” That is what it says, like the freaking queen of hearts. It goes on quote “Which toe? Sixth toe, of course,” as if that was a stupid question, asking which toe to forcibly amputate from a defenseless child. Then “Toe off. What shall I do with it? Ship it to Topeka for interment in government graveyard.” end quote.

So these students are at school, technically, but they aren’t being trained to go into higher education or professions like doctors, lawyers, teachers. They are being taught manual labor skills because they were believed to be good with their hands. Dr. Brenda Child says in that Time Magazine article quote “it was a system that emphasized social class. Indian people were Native, but lower-class [who white people thought] should learn some good manual trades that benefited the white majority. The boarding schools were not really about benefiting Indians. They were a form of segregated education in the history of the United States. And we know who benefits from segregation,” end quote. Starting with the Carlisle school, many schools had an outing program where students worked as manual laborers on farms or as domestic servants cleaning houses. And this was actually used as a selling point to persuade community leaders to establish new boarding schools. Like, build one of these schools in your city and you can have all this cheap child labor. But often the children were paid incredibly unfair wages and then even forced to use that money to pay for their own room and board which should have been provided to them. So it was not a far cry from slave labor. It also removed them from school for months at a time leading to lapses in their education and they were housed in terrible conditions, segregated from white laborers. But these outing programs, this training in manual labor, it served a purpose. They were training these children to become a low class workforce, to do jobs that white Americans viewed as beneath them. They were also training them to go into the military. Because, remember, thanks to Pratt the military officer who started the Carlisle school, these schools were set up in a very militaristic way. They wore uniforms, they conducted regular drills, they had to stand for inspection at 7:30 am on Sundays. And they often fed these students, the boys anyway, directly into the military afterwards to fight and die for a country that neither acknowledged them as citizens nor allowed them to vote. The Phoenix Indian School sent dozens of students to enlist during World War I and at least 2 of them were killed in combat. Many of the Navajo code talkers used during World War II attended these boarding schools, where they were ironically beaten if they spoke Navajo. But now that the language is helping the US military, go ahead and speak Navajo, come speak it for us.

Reports of abuse in these institutions are rampant in survivor’s stories. As I mentioned, children were often beaten if they were caught speaking in their native languages. That New York Times article reports the story of James Labelle and this is not from the 1800s you guys, this is from the 1950s, quote “James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955, when he was taken with his 6-year-old brother to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He said his mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had been given a choice: send her sons to boarding school or put them up for adoption. When his mother chose boarding school, Mr. LaBelle said, he found himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope inserted in the belt loops of their pants. He said his destination, where he spent the next several years, was the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast Alaska. Mr. LaBelle… still finds it hard to describe the treatment he endured at Wrangell. Now 76, his voice grows shaky when he recounts the punishments children received — and how children were turned into punishers. During weekdays, it was common for supervisors to tell children to undress so they could be paddled or whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails, Mr. LaBelle said. And when weekends came, he said, it was time for the “gauntlet,” when some children were ordered to get completely naked and others were ordered to hit them with belts for perceived violations of school rules. “It could have been a prison or a mental hospital,” said Mr. LaBelle, who is now a lecturer on historical trauma and a board member of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “They made the children the enforcers.” When he was 10, Mr. LaBelle said, he and another boy were punished for wrestling by being doused with nearly freezing water from a fire hose. Sexual violence was also rampant, he said, citing the example of a girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator for the entire eight years she was at Wrangell. And in addition to witnessing other male students being raped by a supervisor, Mr. LaBelle said, he was sodomized by another boy. When the lights went out at night, Mr. LaBelle said, he could hear other children, especially some of the youngest, sobbing and calling for their mothers. “It was the only time we could show emotion,” Mr. LaBelle said. “It didn’t take very long until it grew and grew and grew. The entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in the dark,” end quote. Heartbreaking.

And then there were the deaths. Most of these were probably due to disease. We know of measles outbreaks that spread more than they should have because of poor quality care and unsanitary conditions at the schools, but we also have instances of children accidentally being shot. And I’m like, if that happened more than a handful of times it was no accident. But it’s reported as accidental shooting. But then with all these reports of abuse, I’m sure contributed to some of the deaths as well. Abuse and neglect. Like I said, hundreds of bodies have been found in the US but Deb Haaland who is leading the government investigation theorizes that numbers could be in the tens of thousands. 189 students are known to be buried at the Carlisle school alone. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, workers digging irrigation trenches in a park in the 1970s uncovered the bones of children. They later realized this was the cemetery of the Albuquerque Indian School. And if a school has a cemetery, that’s a red flag. Just saying. Any halfway decent school would send a child’s body home to their family to be buried or whatever that culture did, however they dealt with dead bodies. They wouldn’t have been piled unceremoniously into unmarked graves and forgotten about.

According to the New York Times quote “Questions about the costs and effectiveness of assimilation policies, along with revelations of some of the horrors in the system, slowly led to changes. An inquiry in 1928, commonly known as the Meriam Report, detailed how children were malnourished, overworked and harshly disciplined. In the 1930s, when the process of dispossessing Native lands had largely been completed, the federal government began shutting down many of the schools,” end quote. By 1970, most of the schools had closed and those that remained open began transferring authority to indigenous groups themselves. According to an NPR article by Sequoia Carillo and Allison Herrerra, four of these residential schools still exist and operate today but they’re nothing like how they started and, in fact, would horrify their original founders. The article says quote “Much of the school's decor is bright and exuberant, but also full of pride. From murals on the walls to newspaper clippings on the bulletin boards, everything shows American Indian students proud to be Indian… This new approach filters into the curriculum, too… the cultural activities include drum-making, flute-making, dress and ribbon skirt-making, moccasin-making — even little things like dream catchers. The culture is integrated into as many classes as possible,” end quote.

But while most of the schools faded away, were demolished, and forgotten, the people who lived those horrors never forgot. They lived with this generational trauma for centuries. And that includes Secretary Deb Haaland. Both of her grandparents were boarding school survivors. Thanks to her and the investigation she started, the Department of the Interior just, for the first time ever in 200 years, admitted it’s guilt, the role it played in creating the boarding school system that led to so much physical and emotional child abuse. Since her appointment as Secretary of the Interior, Haaland has been traveling around the country, conducting and documenting listening sessions with survivors of Native American residential schools. While speaking to a gym full of people at Riverside Indian School in Oklahoma recently, which is one of those 4 schools that still operates, she said quote “I want you all to know that I am with you on this journey, and I am here to listen, I will listen with you, I will grieve with you, I will weep and I will feel your pain as we mourn what we have lost. Please know that we still have so much to gain. The healing that can help our communities will not be done overnight, but it will be done,” end quote.

More recently, on October 25th actually so just a couple weeks ago, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the government’s involvement in forcing indigenous children into boarding schools at Gila River Indian Community in Arizona saying quote “After 150 years, the government eventually stopped the program [of boarding schools] but never formally apologized. I formally apologize today as President of the United States of America for what we did. I apologize, apologize, apologize. This apology is long overdue and quite frankly there is no excuse this apology took 50 years to make. The pain that this has caused will always be a significant mark of shame,” end quote. The White House released a statement saying quote “In making this apology, the President acknowledges that we as a people who love our country must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful. And we must learn from that history so that it is never repeated,” end quote. And that is my mantra so amen to that.

Secretary Haaland, in her speech before she handed the mic to Biden talked about a quote “10 year national plan driven by tribal leaders,” end quote that includes plans to bring back native languages that children were once beaten for speaking. And other things but it was kept pretty vague. And she acknowledges again and again across so many of my sources that these schools, this forced removal of children from their families, the erasing of their identities, their culture, their language, their religion, this trauma they endured for literal generations is not just something you bounce back from. And we have to factor it in when we look at where indigenous groups are today and the struggles that they face. I preached on this pretty hard in the Great Hunger episode about the Irish potato famine and I related it to issues facing many Black Americans. And the same can be said for the unhoused. Honestly, the same can be said for many Vietnam war veterans to bring it full circle. Because, if you view any of these marginalized groups outside of historical context, it’s easy to go “well, he doesn’t have a job because he’s an alcoholic, and that’s why he lost his house and he has to beg on the streets and I’m not going to give him money because he’ll just buy drugs with it,” like it’s all his fault. Like he isn’t the victim of generational trauma at the hands of the government.

Historical context, perspective is so, so important. And I’m so happy to see the work that Secretary Deb Haaland has done to bring all of this to light. Most of that work is just listening. Just letting people tell their stories, letting them get their stories out, assessing the damage. Then we can start to move forward. We can enact change that not only seeks to help heal the damage done in the past, heal that generational trauma, but prevents more damage in the future, protects these people. Deb Haaland is the first Native American person to serve as a cabinet secretary, and a woman no less. This is the importance of diversity in government right here. If we keep electing the same person to lead over and over again, I don’t need to tell you his race or gender, you already know, if we keep electing that same guy, we’re going to keep getting the same results. Humans are innately self-serving. But if we diversify our leaders, we spread our reach and we finally have a shot at actually serving the masses, not just the people who look and think like us, all the people. We listen, we bring their stories to light. No more wailing in the dark.

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, the US Administration for Children and Families, the US Department of the Interior, the New York Times, Time Magazine, NPR, The National Museum of the American Indian, and the Associated Press. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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